The present invention is directed to data communication.
Over the last few decades, the use of communication networks exploded. In the early days of the Internet, popular applications were limited to emails, bulletin board, and mostly informational and text-based web page surfing, and the amount of data transferred was usually relatively small. Today, Internet and mobile applications demand a huge amount of bandwidth for transferring photo, video, music, and other multimedia files. For example, a social network like Facebook processes more than 500 TB of data daily. With such high demands on data and data transfer, existing data communication systems need to be improved to address these needs. For high-data communication applications, serializer/deserializer (SERDES) are often used.
Over the past, there have been many types of communication systems and methods. Unfortunately, they have been inadequate for various applications. More specifically, detecting loss of signal can be challenging. Therefore, improved systems and methods are desired.